


Sleeping Echo

by Skeren



Series: Hokage Itachi's unfortunate tendency to hop worlds [2]
Category: Naruto
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Dimension Travel, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-29
Updated: 2016-01-29
Packaged: 2018-05-17 02:58:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 491
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5851468
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Skeren/pseuds/Skeren
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After wandering so far from home, only having this other version of himself present kept him from thinking he'd gone mad.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sleeping Echo

**Author's Note:**

> Written March 2015 on Plurk.

He didn't snore. That was the thing that caught his attention when he actually found himself watching the man at rest in the dead of the night. He didn't really breathe either, but that was somehow... expected. The lack of any small puffs of noise while he was at rest though, that unnerved him, made him frown in the dark and put his cheek against his chest.

He didn't have a heartbeat exactly either after all, but he had something, some sense of sound that reassured him that he wasn't curled up with a corpse, but just a spirit in an uncommon body.

It was a night when he'd woken up and the other hadn't, and his chest ached from the weight of memories with no future, and loss of something he couldn't replace.

There were days when he had to remind himself that though this man was another incarnation of himself, he wasn't the one who'd been there and seen his troubles, and he couldn't expect him to know them without being told. 

Somehow, sometimes, that hurt. 

Coming home should have been happy, all those months before, but it had been disorienting, like he was trying to fill up a space much too big for him when he'd been packed down into a tiny ball. He was back to being Hokage, being the person who made the choices and ran the village, and he knew he wasn't as happy as he'd once been, as content as he'd once found himself.

His paperwork now dragged more, was less of a tactile comfort than it had been years, in his mind, hours by the reckoning of the village, before the day he'd gone and returned, without even a mark to show for all his mind had seen. It was the most cruel of genjutsu. Then again, a genjutsu is but glimpsing something that could be and isn't, should be but never will, or never should be and always will be, and that means it's real. For moments or hours, to the viewer it's real, and that's what makes it so powerfully terrible.

Because it touches you, and you never ever forget. He curled his fingers in the cloth of the shirt the other man wore in his rest, examining each line and crack of his face, the way that they faded one into another under his hair and clothes. They were a reminder of who he wasn't, and that he should teach himself to expect nothing, to reset his compass, because this was who he had, and he wouldn't begrudge him.

His presence, after all, was something of a relief, a mercy that let him know that all he remembered wasn't false. 

He just shouldn't confuse him, and should look for the pulse of life rather than the soft sleepy sounds of barely existent snores or heartbeats. 

He'd get there, and then he would be happier overall. 

It would just take time.


End file.
